


let the rough winds fly

by charmtion



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Dark Jon, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Organized Crime, The Starks are Irish, Violence, and Involved in Shady Things
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:55:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27332287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charmtion/pseuds/charmtion
Summary: ‘Come with me,’ he breathes. ‘Will you?’Sansa tastes blood when he kisses her; the salt of it sticks to her teeth. Jon holds one side of her face entire in his hand, a thumb working some distant current along the line of her jawbone. (Like a penny spun, the way they circle one another—round and round till it at last collapses back in on itself.) She bites her lip, surges for his mouth again: salt, a tang of rust blooming coin-like and cloying across her tongue.‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes.’Jon and Sansa are bound together in a particular kind of life, however reluctantly.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 60
Kudos: 168





	1. circle/web

**Author's Note:**

  * For [woodswit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodswit/gifts).



> > title taken from _day in autumn_ by rainer maria rilke // been reading a _lot_ of Irish literature at the moment, as well as [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26598418/chapters/64851358#main) inimitable moody mob au by the one & only woodswit, so— _sláinte_ to all of ye! _&_ maybe to a second chapter?? 🧡

Whispers stick to him like feathers: soft, spoken behind a thousand hands.

They call him an enforcer if they are feeling polite, a brute if his back is turned. Hired muscle, a winter storm that’ll wreck the bones of a thing till it is naught but dust and powder. Snow that blinds and breaks, makes bruises bloom—there is no softness to its edges, jagged as they are.

He tells her that he gets no pleasure in what he does, that business is business and it isn’t he himself who decides the order of it. She knows this better than most, bound as they both are in the same slow-moving, intricate web.

‘Circle,’ he says. ‘A circle, not a web.’

A flare of annoyance to her nostrils. ‘Because neither of us is trapped in it, is that right?’

He ignores that comment. Maybe it is just as well he does. Wouldn’t tell to be listened to or repeated, the treason she speaks when it is just her and him sliced by the dim shadows inside the car.

(Sometimes she wants to scream it: to him, to anyone that will listen. Open her mouth, feel the words tremble on her tongue. Her breath howling like a tempest in her throat. Let the rough winds fly, let them shake and rattle against her fucking teeth.)

A silence settles between them: thin, unyielding. Each waits for the other to break it. He is the first to turn and look at her. She senses him taking in her profile, limned as it is by the wintry neon-blush of the darkened street they are parked up in. Her fingers are knotted together in her lap; her knuckles glow like chips of white marble, tightly-laid.

‘Who was it today?’ she asks. ‘Old fella or a young one?’

‘It was no-one.’

The subtle clench of his fingers on the steering-wheel betrays his words in a breath. His blood is up; the leather shifts and creaks.

‘No-one,’ she says—and a dry little laugh flutters in her throat. ‘It was no-one.’

Her hands feel hot beneath the glare she’s got on them. She lifts them from her lap, claws her fingers to inspect her nails: glossy, black as his heart. His rotten fucking heart.

‘Got them done today,’ she says. ‘Ready for tonight.’

‘Sans— ’

‘I was having fun,’ she hisses. ‘I didn’t want to leave.’

The leather creaks again: a trigger-squeeze of pressure, tightening.

‘Not me who sets the order of things,’ he says calmly. ‘You know that, sweetheart.’

‘Fuck you and your sweetheart.’

Her voice is primed to be as sharp-ringed and shrill as the slap she is aiming at his cheek. A brute, they call him—yet it’s the storm that he is, make no mistake. That trigger-squeeze of pressure is fastened round her wrist now, threatening her skin with a bruise he will never leave. Her fingers writhe in the agony they ache to have wrought, the easy hit that they have been denied. His grip does not lessen, nor does it increase.

(He holds her steady, and she hates him for it.)

‘Look at me.’

‘You’ll let me go.’ She rattles her wrist. ‘Jon, let me go. I mean it.’

‘I’ll let you go when you look at me.’

(Soon as scratch his fucking eyes out, so she would. Scream into the empty hollows left behind by her fingers, her thumbs.)

‘Look at me, Sansa. Will you?’

His voice is gentler now, soft as the damp leaves that shake from the trees and stack against the glass of the windscreen. Her shoulders draw up to hear it, then the breath untangles in her throat.

Finally, she looks at him.

(Oh, but she is a weak woman. A weak, weak woman. Scratch his fucking eyes out, so she would—then kiss away the blood pooled at their edges.)

‘It wasn’t me what said you were to be fetched,’ he says on that low lilt: a leaf-rustle in the gloom. ‘It wasn’t me.’

She thinks of asking who it was, guessing at which of the men it might have been. She thinks of them in the dark-panelled dining room, cutting gestures in a blue fog of cigarette smoke. Robb at the right hand of their father, Theon never far away. Bran and Arya—still a little too tender-hearted for family meetings—stirring sugar into teacups at the kitchen table with Mammy. For a moment, she envies them their innocence; always, she wishes that they could keep it.

‘Young fella.’ Jon lets out a sigh now. ‘Old enough to know better.’

He still has hold of her wrist. His thumb circles the inside of it, very lightly. After a moment, their fingers weave together. The heat of his hand around her own is something that feels as part of her body as her blood, her bones.

‘Did you— ’ she swallows, shifts her head to let a strand of hair skim back behind her ear ‘ —badly?’

His thumb rasps across the back of her hand now. ‘Bad enough,’ he says. ‘Aye. Bad enough, sweetheart.’

(There was a time when his hands were clean, his knuckles unmarked. There was a time when the creases in his palms had never been touched by blood.)

‘I want to get out, Jon.’

‘Of the car?’

She tips her head back against the leather seat, lets a reluctant smile shape her lips. ‘Aye,’ she says. ‘The car’ll do.’

* * *

They stand in a pool of lamplight at the end of the street, share a cigarette whilst their only witness sits square on its tyres in the shadows. Ash tips down the rings on her fingers as she lifts her hand to brush the hair back behind her ear. His eyes track the movement, then come to rest on the right corner of her mouth.

‘Anyone over?’ she asks.

He shrugs. ‘Greatjon. His boy Jimmy. A few other fellas.’

‘Mammy give you trouble before you came to fetch me?’

‘When does she not,’ he says—a little leaf-rustle laugh. ‘Woman hates me.’

‘Hates your poor mother.’ Sansa rolls her eyes. ‘Not you.’

‘You sound like Robb now, so you do.’

She flicks cigarette ash at him. ‘I do not and never will.’

‘Give me that.’

His gaze flits back to her mouth as her cheeks lift in a slow smile. She dances onto her tiptoes, holds the cigarette high above her head. He wraps around her like smoke, heavy water: everywhere, all-consuming.

When he kisses her, she holds her breath till she feels like she is drowning. Lungs burning, head swimming; her throat smooth and hot beneath his hand.

* * *

Back at the house, the babies are in their beds. Her mother, too. The driveway is empty; there are no overcoats trailing down from the pegs on the wall by the front door. A faint blue haze drifts from the dining room, a lingering scent of hours-old tobacco. The men are gone: out for the night, or to attend a last minute bit of business.

Even so, they slip their shoes off, carry them up as they tread the stairs quietly.

(Run, she wants to run—weak, weak woman that she is. Take the steps two at a time, with little care for their creaking.)

His fingers find her hips soon as the door to her bedroom is closed, the lock turned. Against the wall at the side of it, her belly flat to the paint and the plaster. His lips beneath her earlobe, treading soft kisses down the curve of her neck. She turns her cheek against the wall to get a look at him; his mouth finds hers and snatches the whimper from it.

‘You be quiet now,’ he murmurs. ‘Your mammy’ll hear.’

Sansa closes her eyes, pushes her nails into her palms. There is no softness to his voice now; that leaf-rustle laugh is a memory in her ears that dissolves like a whisper. It is a shade of a sound, the low growl he makes when she moans into his mouth again. A shade of a sound that filters through her teeth like air, like smoke. 

(Her throat is burning with a thousand wants, agonies. Pleas that she’ll never let slip. Weak woman that he makes her—but Sansa Stark does not beg. Not for him, not for anyone.)

‘Get on with it,’ she whispers harshly. ‘Will you?’

His fingers flex on her hips. The thumb of his left hand finds a pressure-point just above the waistband of her jeans. Her teeth rattle in a sigh when he lays a little of his strength against it: a trigger-squeeze, a tease. Silently, she unfurls her fists; her nails pare away the button, the zip. His thumb skims the hem of lace beneath, pulls until it snaps. 

Bare and wet, she arches into his hand.

(A hand that blinds and breaks, makes bruises bloom—yet she is glass within the grasp of it; glass that he never will let shatter.)

‘Go on,’ she breathes as he waits. ‘Touch me.’

Circling: his thumb, his breath at her nape. ‘Here?’

‘Yes,’ she says hoarsely. ‘Yes.’

* * *

Something stirs outside: a soft click, gravel shifting. Footsteps on the stairs, the rasp of a familiar cough. A knock at her bedroom door; the barest brush of a knuckle.

‘Jon about the house, is he?’

Sansa tries to take a breath deep enough to steady the drumming of her heart.

‘Haven’t seen him,’ she says after a careful beat. ‘What is it you’re wanting with him?’

Her brother sniffs, scratches another cough. ‘Dad’s wanting. Not me.’

‘I’ll be sure to call if I see him,’ she says softly. ‘Okay?’

‘Grand. You sleep well now, Sans.’

She puts her face into the pillow to bite off her reply, trembling as it is on the shaky moan pulling up from her lungs. Jon moves his hips in time with Robb’s descending footsteps—sharp, quick—and puts his hand against her belly when her knees threaten to fold in, collapse. Damp from her breath, the cotton clings to her mouth.

‘Fuck. Oh, fuck.’

Behind her, a gruff whisper. ‘You there?’

‘Nearly. Just— ’

He is there before the pillow has time to muffle her words. She arches her back as his hand shimmers down her belly, as his thumb rolls across her clit. A fine point of pleasure, so fine it feels almost violent. Instinctively, her body tries to surge away from it, from him; but she is caught in the web of his grip. 

(He holds her steady, and she cannot hate him for it.)

The chasing of his end pulls through the eddies of her own. His hand has left her hip. Buried in her hair, his fingers flex gently till she is rocking back onto her haunches, the heels of her hands. They meet each other, some mirror of movement frayed at its very edges even as the centre of it gleams, glows.

His hips stutter, still; sweat beads her skin like raindrops on a pane of glass.

(But she will never break, not when it is his hands that hold her.)

‘Sansa,’ he whispers—and this is the moment where he falls apart. ‘ _A mhuirnìn_.’

(Oh, but she aches to shatter, too. To sparkle as a million pieces embedded in his very skin.)

A thousand pleas click against her teeth; for a moment she is tempted to let the rough winds fly from her throat, the unspoken words tumble out from between her lips. She presses her face into the pillow instead, bows her back to allow his body to sag and blanket her own.

Her limbs feel heavy, useless.

The sweat cools quickly on her skin. Cotton clouds her tongue, her head. He shifts a little against her spine; the brush of his beard at her nape feels like silk, somehow. She takes another breath: cotton, salt—rust.

All too soon the rosy flush fades from the air. The aftermath folds itself into the room: sober, sticky. He does not pull away just yet. There is time enough still to pretend, to make up a narrative that spins on a separate axis to what will happen once he presses a last kiss to her shoulder and leaves the room to fade into the night.

(His hands will blind and break, then: sinew, bone—even glass.)

‘I want to get out, too.’

Carefully, Sansa turns her cheek against the damp cotton of her pillow. She looks into his eyes, the dark of them glittering like slate after a storm. Her lips part; her voice sits low in her throat.

‘Of the bed?’

That leaf-rustle laugh settles back on her cheek, then his lips. A kiss that sears through skin to the bone beneath: fierce, feverish as the gleam in his gaze, his smile.

‘This bed here?’ he says huskily. ‘Ah no. I’ll stay here for just a moment, sweetheart—if you’ll let me.’

She puts her hand out onto the mattress, smiles as he covers it with his own. ‘Aye,’ she says. ‘A moment’ll do.’

* * *

He moves like a wolf beneath the moonlight, and Sansa is left inside in the quiet. It’s the quiet that she finds so hard to bear. Slippery, suffocating: a prop cigarette lit between her fingers, a twist of grey smoke seeping into her hair as she rests the back of her hand against her forehead, sighs a stream up to the ceiling.

What comes before is easy, so reflexive as to be comforting. The black car pulling up outside a house, a club, a party; the barbs thrown and traded in the shadows of its interior as it zips through city streets, country lanes. The marks on his hands, the feel of them on her body. The sex—all the clumsy, tumbling heat of it. His tongue between her thighs, his cock silky in her palm. Every bit of her open to him, begging for him in a way her words never would, never will.

She rolls over onto her belly now, stubs the cigarette out viciously in the ashtray beside the bed. Her phone is cool against her ear, buzzing with that familiar rattle of a cough.

‘He stopped by,’ she says nonchalantly. ‘Said he’s on the way to you now, so he is.’ She pushes a knuckle above her eyebrow. ‘Alright. Good. Yeah, I’ll see you.’

A knock at the door as she puts her phone down next to the still-smoking ashes. She looks up, pulls the robe tighter to her shoulder as she gives a word.

Her mother comes in, hair a pile of curls barely pressed from sleep. Her sharp blue eyes take in the room in a second: the rug with one corner turned, the rumpled linen, the sash-window pushed open, a fog of cigarette smoke and something sweeter drifting out into the cold air.

The lines soften at the edges of that sapphire stare, even as her lips pull tight together. ‘It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, child.’

‘So it is, Mammy—so it is.’ 

A wash of rosewater as the bed dips beneath her mother’s weight. ‘Love him, do you?’

‘No,’ she says, too quickly. ‘I don’t know what I feel. Not really.’

‘Your father would kill him—you know that much at least.’

Sansa keeps her eyes on the black square of the window. Her mother’s voice is soft as anything; but it may as well be stones, hefted and shot like bullets at the glass.

‘I sometimes think I don’t want this life, Mammy.’

‘Might be this life doesn’t want you, either.’ There is something behind the brisk tone, something tired, weathered. ‘But we’re in it, _a stór_. God knows we are in it.’ A sudden bustling off the bed; a quick movement to disguise the slowness, the sadness to her words. ‘Now, you sleep and you forget him. Do you hear me, child—do you hear?’

Sansa nods but does not speak. Rosewater clings to the print of a goodnight kiss on her cheek long after the door to her bedroom is quietly closed. The curtains dance in the cool breeze sweeping in through the window. Like treacle, that air: thick and dark and cloying.

Come the morn the men will be back, and he along with them. Between now and then lay the long dark hours of the night, a thousand no-ones making ready to wake up to a different kind of kiss: bruising metal, knucklebones honed and hardened by use. Use—and a fury as bottomless and blinding as a winter storm, a sudden snowfall.

He tells her that he gets no pleasure in what he does, that business is business and it isn’t he himself who decides the order of it. She knows this better than most, bound as they both are in the same slow-moving, intricate web.

( _Circle_ , he would say. _A circle, not a web_ —and perhaps he is right. They go round and round it after all.)

* * *


	2. skin

Birdsong wakes her, the faintest trilling of it burbling up from some distant scrub of wind-warped trees.

Sansa stares at the reddish square of the window for a moment, then closes her eyes. Beneath her breath, she begins to count. Soon enough, a more familiar litany drowns the birdsong out: car doors closing in a chorus, the click and crunch of gravel underfoot. Low voices, laughter dark as the deeds wrought in the inky hours of the night.

They are back, and they have brought with them a dawn sky the colour of Christ’s blood—or so the priest would call its shade, cry hellfire and damnation.

‘Child.’ A shout now scraping up the bannister. ‘Come down, will you? Your father has need of you.’

Sansa puts the back of her hand to her forehead, keeps her eyes closed. She wants badly a cigarette: something sharp and hot, something that’ll burn the breath away from her lungs, her throat.

The bones in her chest pull tight as she holds her inhale, collapse inward with the exhale that accompanies her sliding from the bed. She ties the sash of the robe at her waist, puts her hands into the pockets of it as she makes her way down the creaking staircase.

She spots her brother first amongst the group crowded round the kitchen table. There is blood on his brow, a dull sheen of it glazing his teeth. She steps up to him, puts his chin between her thumb and finger to turn his face toward the light.

‘What wars have you been fighting?’ 

‘A lonely one,’ says Robb. ‘Till the lad chanced to show up.’

Her eyes flit to follow the jut of his chin. ‘Hurt, is he? Looks fine to me.’

‘Not a scratch on him.’ Robb’s voice is cheerful. ‘Should see the other fella.’

The words burn her tongue, leap from it before she can bite them back. ‘I’ve no wish to see that.’

‘Sansa,’ says her mother sharply from beside the sink. ‘That’s fair enough of that, now.’ 

A movement at the head of the table; every man in close proximity shifts and unfolds away from it deferentially. Reflexively, her gaze leaps to follow it.

Her father scratches at a worry-line with his fingertips, turns his smile upon his daughter. Sansa feels the weight of it, cool and silvery as water drawn from the heart of a well.

‘Our Jon’s a good lad,’ he says quietly. ‘A good, loyal lad.’ His smile shimmers, a fleeting ripple soon lost in the depths of his frown. ‘Will you see now to your brother’s hurts, _a stór_ —please?’

It is only once she has turned—nodding—toward the tap that she realises the kitchen has fallen so quiet she can hear birdsong rising from the far-off trees.

Water rushes over her fingers; salt pricks her eyes. Soon enough, the bird’s brook-soft singing is once again drowned out.

* * *

The babies trundle down from their beds, find laps and knees and table-corners to perch on, clamouring as only the young have license to: loudly—for tea and dippy eggs and toast half-sunk in jam. 

(Watch these men surrender to smiles, melt beneath the sticky press of small fingers. These same men with murder in their hearts.)

Sansa fixes tea, sips it slowly as Rickon plays with the sash of her robe. Lock of her lock, the reddish hair she rustles, presses a fleeting kiss against. Her head fills with soft, clean scents: soap, washing powder, ashy crumbs sticking to a smile so beautiful and tragic in its innocence.

(There is no room for murder in her own heart, never has been—the way it aches to shatter, explode like spun glass at the sight of a smile, the fear of the frown it’ll turn into as the years kick and fuss away at it.)

‘You’ll have more toast,’ she says softly. ‘Will you?’

Lock of her lock, the early sun turning it to copper as her baby brother nods _please_ through jam-streaked cheeks. Another kiss to his brow, then she is up from the table, and he is turning to find a dog to feed his crusts to.

At the counter, her fingers drumming a rhythm upon it as the bread disappears inside the toaster. Sansa puts her chin against her shoulder, looks back to the scene she now stands separate from.

No smoking in the kitchen—Mammy’s rule is law, believe it—so the air is clear and sun-shot, little dust-motes drifting up from a chair-leg scuffed against the tiles. Robb’s teeth are scrubbed of blood, glinting white at some coarse thing Theon is venturing to say, safely sequestered as the pair of them are at the table-corner furthest from her father. Others crowd in to listen even so; laughter darkens the edges of the room.

The toaster springs to life behind her, makes her heart ricochet against her ribs.

Sansa puts the plate down in front of Rickon. Across the table, Arya catches at her eye. Her sister—dark hair no less wild for being sleep-smoothed—is a year too old to claim a lap for a chair, a fact she does her best to pretend she does not miss or mourn.

(It was Jon’s knee she dandled on from cradle till Christmas last. Her favourite of their father’s men; a bond between them both fierce and pure, brothers in all but blood. Brothers, aye—Arya never will tell it any different.)

Sansa sips her tea, tries not to think of how easy life would be if she shared the same ardent feelings her sister harbours. A love fierce and familial, innocent and pure. There would be no need for hateful words, then; no hard, hungry hands wrenching apart her heart in the shadows.

* * *

The day drifts onward, and they along with it. Duty pulls at them, seeks to set them apart; but there is no avoiding him, there never is.

(Like a penny spun, the way they circle one another—round and round till it at last collapses back in on itself.)

He finds her in a place previously thought safe: the little redbrick alley half a street away from dropping the babies off to school. Sansa grinds the half-smoked cigarette beneath the heel of her boot, looks at him looming like a storm at the alley’s end. Her brow arches. She tries to ignore the ribbon of heat spooling below her navel.

‘What can I do you for?’

‘There’s to be a party,’ he says—and the sulky tone dies on her tongue. ‘The Ned wants certain things got for it. My job to procure them, so.’

A laugh huffs out from her nose. ‘Loyal skin that you are.’

‘That’d be me.’ His hands are in his pockets; the coat flares away from his sides as he spreads a gesture with them. ‘Care to be a help?’

She taps the toe of her boot atop the crushed cigarette, considers. ‘Is there a new dress in it for me?’

‘What do you think, sweetheart?’

(She thinks that there is—that he is already imagining the way he will slip it from her body with his bruised, bloodied hands when the party is in full swing.)

The cigarette splits beneath her boot, finely-ground tobacco spills out from its paper and clings like dust to the pavement. Sansa walks toward him with quick, neat steps.

His hand settles on the small of her back as he guides her toward the car at the kerb. The heat of his palm slips through her coat, her sweater—seeps into her skin, her blood. His thumb circles the memory of a knot kneaded out the night before; her breath hitches in her throat.

(She wants his fingers in her mouth. Everywhere, she wants them everywhere—weak, weak woman that she is.)

There is a knowing lift to his cheeks as he holds the car door open for her. She does not smile back, only slams the door shut herself, tries to ignore that leaf-rustle laugh whistling beyond the glass.

* * *

Dressed and dolled for a party, Sansa is her mammy’s dream—her father’s nightmare. His pretty porcelain-cheeked girl, laugh as sweet as a summer sky, grown now into a young woman with the hips and tits to set the silky fabric of her new dress smooth against her skin. He is not the only one to notice the change; he never is, never will be.

(Watch these men surrender to her smiles, melt beneath the sunny balm of her small attentions. These same men with murder in their hearts.)

They say that she carries herself like a queen, what with her copper hair piled as it is like a gleaming crown atop her head. Sansa puts her hand to it, straightens out a stray strand as she gifts them another smile. Robb—sequestered in yet another shadowy corner—puts a heavy hand on Theon’s arm, speaks one low word into his ear.

(Oh, but there is room for a little murder in her heart all at once—the familiar glint that is busy settling in Theon’s eye as he roves it over her figure: a weighted net scraping viciously at the seabed.)

Music turns her away from men and murder, and—briefly, gloriously—she is a spinning doll, shoes kicked off as she twirls on her tiptoes and laughs into Jeyne’s neck, finds Arya’s hand and pulls her into the dancing crowd of curs and cousins. They are skin glittering with a fine mist of perspiration, they are painted lips pulled _up_ and wide. They are girls: good, sweet girls caught up in a spinning circle, a web that—for tonight, at least—feels soft as silk.

(Free, they are free for a moment. This precious fucking moment.)

Drunk on little more than liberty, Sansa slips out from the living room. Her sides hurt from laughing; but as she nears the kitchen, a stillness slides cool fingers between her ribs. She does not need to look over her shoulder to know who it is that is following her. His calmness cloaks her, and the laughter on her tongue dies to a soft sigh shallow in its breadth.

‘Get in there,’ he says quietly. ‘Back against the sink.’

She wonders at what pretence he has given to leave the living room so soon after she herself has left it. Wonders, distantly, if a man like him need give any rhyme or reason to what he decides, what he does.

(Of course he must. Jon might be a winter storm; but the sky still holds his leash, weighs it in a palm, feels it slip across the skin—cool and silvery as water drawn from the heart of a well.)

The edge of the sink cuts into the swell of her hips; the floor-tiles are cold against her soles. She lifts onto her tiptoes to get away from the sting of it. She lifts onto her tiptoes to try and contain the flicker of heat blooming between her thighs. She lifts onto her tiptoes because that is where the hand of God tries to pull her—skyward, away from Hell—whenever Jon steps into the same room as she stands within.

It might be that she says something, makes some little jest or joke, tries to spin a bit of sarcasm into the air that hangs so still between them. But if she does speak she is not aware of it, not really. She is aware only of the hulking shape of him cutting through the glass-shot moonlight, the soundless glide of his steps across the tiles.

‘Pretty dress, is it not?’ he murmurs—and she looks down to realise he has a fold of silk caught between his fingers. ‘Got all the fellas looking.’

‘Are they so?’ Her voice is some soft, fragile thing furling its wings inside her throat. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

His lips catch at her chin. She tips back her head, offers him her throat without another word. The bass of his growl makes the wingbeat flutter frantically beneath her skin, bound and leap till drumming fills her ears. That same beat is between her legs now, too: white-hot, relentless in its gathering of ache and hunger.

‘You can touch me now,’ she breathes. ‘If you’ve had your fill of looking.’

‘Sarcasm, is it?’ he says in a sharp, mocking tone. ‘That’s fair enough of that, now.’

(This game of theirs is dangerous, true enough—and there is no way on God’s green earth they can put a stop to playing it.)

He puts his palms on her hips now, then slips them down slowly to catch a handful of her skirt. A fleeting kiss burns the breath from her lungs before he bows to his knees, looks up at her through his lashes. Her nails dig into the counter either side of the sink; the cool ceramic blooms through her dress, kisses at her skin as she shifts to settle a leg over his shoulder. 

A thumb on her ankle—circling softly—drifting along up her shin, the knot of her knee. His fingers skate the top of her thigh; his eyes hold her own for a brief, breathless moment before he leans forward.

She makes a sound: some reedy, broken thing swiftly caught by the notch of her knucklebone between her teeth. Her fingers find his hair, prick into his scalp as he opens his mouth on her, drives her clit up with the tip of his tongue, engulfs the whole of her in a kiss she is sure must carry on the air—the sound of it: wet and thick as honey, as blood.

(Christ’s blood, the Devil’s blood. The glint of his gaze in the moonlight half hellish, half holy. It makes no matter—please God, let her drown in it.)

‘Jon,’ she whispers. ‘Oh, Jon.’

Sansa does not hear her name whispered back—she feels it, each tender letter pressed hot and binding into her skin, her bones: the essence of her soul, the shadowy pulse at her very centre.

* * *

It is close to the quiet time now, that early-hours glow where the whiskey is mostly drunk and the raucous singing has folded itself almost to whispers.

The living room is bathed in the reddish glow of the dim lamps resting on their polished tables beside the sofas. Her parents are lapsed back in a leather cup of cushions, the auld man’s hands tangled up in Mammy’s hair. He strokes the soft, red strands between thumb and forefinger, speaks of cherries and embers and the fall of leaves in the autumn winds—all the things that can never shine so brightly as his fair love’s locks.

(It’s a well-known legend that to cut out Ned Stark’s heart entire all a man need do is cut short his wife’s red hair. Legend, so it is—no man’d be mad enough to test its truth.)

Arya is still awake, frowning at the softness of sleep threatening to smooth out the sharp-cut edges of her face. Lolled into Jon’s side on the other sofa, her eyes narrowing cat-like as she listens to the soft things he no doubt is telling her. Sansa watches with an ache in her heart.

(He is a different man entire around her baby sister, resting as she does gentler in his grip than even glass.)

The quiet time, the gentle waves of it beckoning. A leery old drunk singing of the parting glass in the way that old men often do; so mellow and mournful in their threading of it that their eyes are closed and lips turned down. Sansa leans back into the sofa, closes her own eyes for a moment as she hums the tune beneath her breath.

‘Looking a fair sight fuckable tonight—if you don’t mind my saying.’

Her eyes flicker open slowly. ‘I mind.’

‘Lighten up a bit, Sans.’ Theon lets free a merry laugh. ‘Will you?’ He slips up closer to her on the sofa, leans to glaze her ear with his winey breath. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t mind to share.’

Those wings swoop low in her throat, flutter dangerously. ‘You’ll kindly go fuck yourself now, Theon.’

‘Rather it be you that I’d go fucking,’ he breathes into her neck. ‘Mm, my sweet little Sansa. How about it?’

Theon makes a clumsy paw at her knee—and the room erupts.

Her fingers sting from the slap now turning fair skin rosy; Theon howls and holds his cheek. There is chaos, and noise—so much noise. A chorus of cries and whiskey-scented shouts drowning out the old drunk’s singing. Sansa is flung back into the crook of the sofa-cushions by some storm of movement, some distant flood of thuds falling swift and sure as a sudden snowfall.

Something creaks, snaps.

(It is the sound of a bone breaking. Sansa knows this. Sansa tries hard not to know this—the sound of a bone being wrecked till it is naught but dust and powder.)

The scuffle—it is not a scuffle; it is a siege, a sure-won fight—is pulled apart. Arya is looking at the coffee table upended, the scattered flowers and broken bottles. There is horror in her baby sister’s eyes, and Sansa’s heart breaks to see it: slowly, cleanly. There it is—innocence gone, burned up steady as the blood seeping into the carpet.

‘Daft cunt.’ Robb’s voice somewhere: choked, heavy. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you, Theon? He could’ve fucking killed you.’

‘Still fucking can,’ snarls Jon from the edge of the room. ‘Leave off me—I said get your fucking hands off me.’

Jostling, rustling: a pack of dogs trying to keep grip on a wolf run wild. Sansa takes the room in with one fell, numb sweep, and their eyes meet. There is no blood on his brow, no dull sheen of it glazing his teeth. His muscles are pulled taut against his tee-shirt; his fists held fast at his sides.

(There was a time when his hands were clean, his knuckles unmarked. There was a time when the creases in his palms had never been touched by blood. But tonight—tonight they are drowning in it.)

Her father stands up from the sofa, and stillness laps like a water-ripple through the room. He looks at Jon, at Robb—and then at Sansa. Her heart blooms thickly around its breaks, beats an ache against her ribs. That smile again: cool and silvery, crushing.

‘Take him outside,’ he says quietly. ‘Go on with them, there’s a good lad.’ He puts a hand on Jon’s shoulder, squeezes gently. ‘Away with you to sober up. No harm done. Theon’s sorry—aren’t you, boyo?’

(A winter storm, true enough, and the sky that holds the power of it in a weathered palm. Like a leash, the way it slips across the skin—there is no way of knowing what’ll happen if it ever does come loose of that which tethers it.)

‘Aye,’ says Theon thickly. ‘And to you, Ned. Catelyn—Sansa.’

Sansa dips a nod, puts the tips of her fingers against her lips. ‘I’ll—’ she says, swallows ‘ —I’ll put the baba to bed.’

Arya brooks no argument, follows meekly, lets Sansa fold her into the daisy-dashed duvet. She smooths the wild hair down with a trembling hand, then creeps back out into the upstairs hallway. A floorboard creaks, and she is spun back softly against the papered wall.

(How is it a man who can break a bone with a single, well-aimed fist now holds her between his fingers, spins her like she is made of glass—and never does let her shatter.)

‘ _A mhuirnìn_ ,’ he breathes. ‘Come with me. Will you?’

Sansa tastes blood when he kisses her; the salt of it sticks to her teeth. Jon holds one side of her face entire in his hand, a thumb working some distant current along the line of her jawbone.

(Like a penny spun, the way they circle one another—round and round till it at last collapses back in on itself.)

She bites her lip, surges for his mouth again: salt, a tang of rust blooming coin-like and cloying across her tongue.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes.’

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I debated on keeping this—the _asoiaf_ Irish crime family au that nobody asked for—a one-shot; but it has consumed my days of late, so here we are. I'm really enjoying writing it, which is often the way with self-indulgent things, eh? Let me know if you are here/enjoyed this chapter; I am but a lonely little writer always happy for a chat! ❤️  
>   
>  **translations:** _a stór_ [my treasure] _a mhuirnìn_ [my darling/my sweetheart] x


	3. the county-line

It is a long drive toward and through the county-line—a long, silent drive.

Whatever softness cradled their footsteps up along the hallway has simmered down by now, burned away. The air inside the car is thick with something else: something despairing, sharp. It pricks at her throat, sits on the skin like a haze of daggers in the dark.

Open country crowds the window, slips by in fits and flashes. The blueish glow of a lone petrol station, the shifting bovine shapes in the fields that pack the hillsides. There is just dark and shadow, the odd needle-point of light.

(There is just the blood beneath the nails of his right hand, the bruises on his knuckles spreading like spilt ink.)

Sansa tries not to look at the blood, the bruises. She keeps her eyes on the outside world instead—anything to avoid the cramped reality of her own interior—and works hard to make it so that city streets soon sit as a memory at the base of her skull: faint, pale.

(Let her gaze drown in the little flares of farm-lights, the cows in the fields. Let the blood be washed from his skin.)

A shiver sweeps across her shoulders. She is still wearing her little party dress. How she wishes she’d never once been promised it. How she wishes she’d spent the night keeping Arya away from the living room, from scattered flowers and broken glass. They could have burrowed into the daisy-dashed duvet together, watched some twee life play out on a little screen as the sounds of the party below moved on without them.

Her eyes rake the dark shadows of the hills viciously now.

(Oh, but this is a desolate place—a desolate fucking place.)

Jon turns the dial of the heater up without a word. Warm air snatches the rattle from her teeth, soothes the sting of cold from her skin.

She does not think to thank him. To thank him would be to turn her head, and to turn her head would be to see his right hand resting on the steering-wheel. She has no wish to see that, not yet—the fingers tensed as they are like the spine of a hunting wildcat, blood wicked across teeth and talon—and so she does not turn her head, does not thank him, does not look from the bleak world outside her window.

They drive along in silence. 

* * *

Fifty miles out is enough to catch some anonymity in whatever hotel they choose to check into. The choosing doesn’t take long. Quiet time, quiet season; half the strip is shut, and of the handful that are open only one has a door not hanging off its hinges.

A door mostly on its hinges it might have—but an occupant to come and open it seems doubtful. She knocks again, a little firmer this time. Her heels click against the concrete of the hotel’s threshold, shifting them as she is to try and drum some heat up the bones of her legs. After an age, the door opens.

He pays in cash: a fat roll of fifties soon half-lost again in the depths of his trouser pocket. The clerk doesn’t seem to notice the faint, reddish thumbprint at the corner of one of the notes. He does not hand back any change; they do not ask for it. They leave him flush and lamplit behind his counter, climb the stairs to their room.

She kicks her heels off, sways to stand in front of the radiator hemmed up beneath the window. A car passes by in the street below: a faint exhaust-rattle, the blarey howling bass of late-night teens. She closes her eyes, tips back her head. The glass kisses coolly at her crown. Her limbs feel heavy, as if they have carried her to this point in place of cold metal and worn tires.

He leaves her standing, lets her sway as she is like to do when the thoughts behind her eyes crowd them closed. She listens to him shifting things about the room, listens to the lock turn and click.

A tap runs.

Distantly, she wonders if he is washing his hands. He always does after a fight, and most often she is there to watch him do so. However many have there been—is it hundreds now, or thousands? She sees it clear as day, never mind that her eyes are closed. The hateful elegance of those hands, sun-browned and strong; the way he uses his thumbnail to slide the soap around and under each fingertip.

Soap, water—rust in the sink. If only bruises could wash away easy as dirt, as blood.

* * *

Voices rise tinny from the television. Sansa has kept it on all night, huffing a breath of laughter through her nose every now and then. The pins have been pulled from her hair, lined up like little soldiers atop the dresser. She combs loose strands through her fingers, glances from the mirror to the glow of the screen and back again. Gives another laugh as she teases out another tangle.

Jon sits on the edge of the bed behind her, elbows balanced on his knees, the tips of his fingers forming a sway-sided pyramid. On occasion, he touches them to his lips, his forehead—as if in quiet contemplation, as if in prayer. The thought makes her laugh again, a little louder this time.

There is a flare of danger to what she is doing. Sansa knows this well. He is folded up and around his tension, kneading it between his ribs till the muscles in his back press through his tee-shirt like rises in a mountain-range. What is inside him has till now been brewing silently; but she knows that soon it will break.

(A winter storm, is that not what he is? A winter storm that’ll wreck the bones of a thing till it is naught but dust and powder.)

She finds the sleeve of his discarded sweater, puts the edge of it between her lips and wets it with her tongue. The wool feels rough on her skin; her lashes catch at it as she rubs away the smudged mascara from beneath her eyes. A character falls flat on his face, the screen pulses with mechanic laughter. She joins in.

(Let him blow and break. Let him rage. Sansa Stark is not afraid—not of him, not of anyone.)

The sweater seems to cling to her skin long after she has set it down. The feel of it, the scent of it. Aftershave, tobacco, spilt whiskey—the faintest twist of her perfume somewhere amongst it all. It fills her nose, her throat. She hates how it feels like home, like Hell, all at once. Somewhere low in her throat, a hiccup of a sound is starting. Behind her, the bedsprings shift as he sits up straight.

(Oh, but it is building and—weak, weak woman that she is—there is a pit deepening between her hipbones, too. There is a hunger in her to feel his hands on her skin: those hands hateful in their elegance, their knowing ways and whiles.)

‘Sansa,’ he says now, as if he senses it, as if he knows. ‘Sweetheart.’

But she shakes her head, clenches hard hands around the edge of the dresser. Bows her brow toward the mirror, nails scraping at the smooth wood. The bed shifts again; but she moves first. Up away from the mirror, the dresser, the chair still bearing her imprint. She hazes a path toward the bathroom door, fingers finding an earring and fiddling to loose the clasp from her left lobe.

‘Sansa,’ he says, then— ‘Christ, Sansa. Speak to me, will you?’

‘What is there to say?’ she hisses. ‘Thank you, Jon—please, Jon—do it again, Jon.’

‘He shouldn’t have— ’

‘You broke his fucking arm, Jon!’

The earring rips free from her lobe, and he is there boxing in the blooming sting it leaves with his mouth, his teeth. From low in the valley of her throat, that hiccup rises: a moan, so bleak and raw it feels like blood on her tongue.

(She wants to hate him, to hurt him. She wants to curl her fingers into claws and make a scar on his skin to match the one running jagged over his eye.)

He drinks it: that bit of rust, that penny-stain of a sound. Her lungs hurt, her head hurts; her collarbone feels strung-tight as if she has been crying.

(She wants him to call her _a mhuirnìn_ —she wants to feel every letter of it fall from his lips onto her eyelids.)

His right hand cradles the curve of her cheek, even as the knuckles of his left press hard into her throat. She wraps her fingers around his fist, opens her mouth to take him deeper. He slides a thigh between her own; she hates herself for how quickly she finds comfort in bearing down on it. Her hips roll. She wants the dress off her body, she wants her skin bare and blueish in the dim lamplight. With a frantic yank, she guides his hand from her throat—away, down.

Jon groans when his finger slips inside her. A teasing circle, then two pushing gently in and up to meet the thumb he is pressing lightly on her clit. Her blood feels staticky, pulsing as if her veins are wires beating blue at her wrists, her temple. He starts a gentle rhythm, licks a line along her jaw until he is teasing her lower lip between his teeth.

His voice lingers with his bite. ‘How long have you been like this?’

‘Since you wouldn’t let me come in the kitchen,’ she breathes. ‘Selfish prick that you are.’

His teeth sing against her skin; she flutters around his fingers. ‘You’ll come now,’ he says. ‘Will you?’ 

(Maybe it is she that is the storm—how she feels fit to build and break, to drag him under with her, to wreck him till he is naught but dust and powder.)

He moves his thumb. She cries a curse against his name into his mouth, throws it from her tongue even as it is she herself that comes undone beneath a spell she can never hope to weave without him.

(Dust and fucking _powder_.)

‘That’s it,’ he whispers as she hisses at him. ‘Oh, you’re good, aren’t you? You’re so good for me, sweetheart.’

Her fingers are claws at the sides of his face; but her thumbs stroke smooth the tight skin beneath his eyes—softly, softly—and her curse turns almost prayer-like, the way she is singing it.

* * *

They do not speak about the party, about Theon, about the scene in the living room, the broken bottles and bloodstained carpet. It is what they have always done. They tease and taunt and they trace circles on each other’s skin; but they do not speak of it—this life they lead, this life they find a haven from only when they are alone together, however briefly.

They survive it because they do not speak of it.

(Perhaps sometimes they circle it—the truth that glares at them beneath the neon-glow of streetlights, through moonlit curtains in tired hotel rooms—but it is the only penny spun that never does fall.)

She wants a cigarette. They drink tea instead. His lips are still hot from the cup when he dips his mouth between her legs again. Her fingers knot into his hair as she lifts her hips to meet his tongue. He holds her thighs in his hands. His palms are hot from the cup, too, and she melts into them, into him.

Later, when he goes to turn her onto her belly, she stops him. There is a faint flicker of surprise in his face, a glint of something else in his eyes.

(It is always Sansa that dictates how it is he’ll move inside her. It is always Sansa that puts herself onto her hands and knees, tosses her hair across her shoulder as if daring him to swoop in and get a taste of the skin it lashes.)

He says nothing as he slides up between her parted thighs; the softness of her belly dips away from the hard lines of his own. She runs her fingers down the scars notched on each of his ribs, arches a brow at him as he fixes her with a look that somehow feels more knowing than questioning. Her eyes dip down to what she wants, then find his own again. He does not move; a hint of a plea slips into the hollow of her throat.

‘Fuck me,’ she says softly. ‘Will you just fuck me?’

He doesn’t answer her—not with words.

(They survive because they do not speak, after all.)

* * *

In the car the next morning she thinks about making him pull over, thinks about sliding onto his lap and twining herself around him like ivy: thick, choking. Her forearms are still cross-marked by the little tiles in the shower, her hips still aching from the harsh rhythm he set as the water burned her back—and she wants him again: here, now.

Sansa settles into her seat instead, turns her head to let the flute of smoke drift from her lips through the cracked window. The cigarette dips between her fingers as she smooths her eyebrow with the side of her thumb.

‘It’ll be breakfast time,’ she says. ‘The babies will be up. Even Mammy’ll not be able to hide where it is I’ve been gone to— _who_ it is I’ve been gone with.’

Jon taps the steering-wheel with a lazy palm. ‘I don’t think it matters all that much,’ he says quietly. ‘Plain as day where things stand, is it not?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means I made sure of a scene last night, didn’t I?’ His palm lands a little louder on the leather now. ‘Can fair as fuck you in the kitchen—and it’s Theon fucking Greyjoy getting handsy that gets us caught.’

Her nostrils flare. ‘Like I asked you to act the prick.’

‘I never said that.’

She takes in a lungful of smoke, speaks through it. ‘Your tone is clear enough.’

‘My tone is— ’

‘ —pretty fucking pointed, is what it is.’

‘Well, I’m sorry for my tone.’ He wrenches on the indicator, spins the steering-wheel hard. ‘I’m just a little stressed, is all.’

‘Are you so?’ she says sarcastically. ‘And what am I—relaxed, carefree?’

‘Sansa— ’

‘Alright,’ she snaps. ‘Alright, Jon. I know. Okay? I know.’ 

Silence settles quickly back between them.

She thinks of the television, the tinny laughter, the fall. She thinks of a fifty-euro note, a reddish stain pressed into its corner. She thinks of the fabric of her dress crackling beneath his palms as he pulled it from her body, the weight of his hand on the small of her back as she bent over the taps in the tub. She thinks of the waterdrops hitting her cheeks, washing away the salt of her tears.

(She thinks of this life they lead, share, circle—this desolate fucking life.)

‘ _A mhuirnìn_.’

(It is a secret sound, a shape seen only by the darkness that beckons it. Yet now—somehow—here it is: sparkling in the daylight.)

‘ _A mhuirnìn_ ,’ he says again. ‘I have you. Okay? I have you and it will be alright.’ His voice is soft, impossibly so: a spun-cloud, a summer sky from long ago. ‘That I do promise.’

Dimly, she realises that the car has stopped. That he is leaning over her. She turns toward him wordlessly. His hands find her face, hold it entire in his palms. She is caught between his fingertips, tears glittering like diamond-drops on her eyelashes—lifted away now by his lips, by kisses that swallow whole the bitter jewels bled by them both.

‘Alright,’ she says softly. ‘Alright, Jon.’

His kiss lingers on her mouth, her cheek; each letter that falls from his lips clings to her skin, her soul. She takes his hand as he shifts the car away from the kerb, lifts his knuckles to her chin. Her breath slips between them, glosses the silver ring on his thumb with a web of warmth. His skin tastes like a dream of home: good, clean.

(The blood has been washed away; but the bruises remain—on his knuckles, on her heart—and perhaps there is no way else to get rid of them but to cover their pain with kisses, wait for their ink to fade away, and pray that it never will bloom again.)

Softness slips back between them.

It is a long drive toward and through the county-line—a long, silent drive.

They savour the silence, for soon there will be noise and fury, a chaos of shouts and threats.

(Then will come the quiet, that crushing quiet cool and silvery as water drawn from the heart of a well.)

Sansa thinks now of her mother’s hair, of her father’s hands tangled up within it. She thinks of the babies at the breakfast table, of her brother with blood on his brow and murder in his heart. She thinks of Jon, the darkness in him, the light that lingers there as well. She closes her eyes, feels the weight of his hand in her lap.

(Blood, water: it’s a well-known truth which one is thicker—a well-known truth no man’d be mad enough to test. No man, aye—no man.)

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are here, I love you—& rest assured that there are more Stark family feels (read: angst/drama) coming next chapter. Backstory, too! Now—go listen to some Radie Peat! 🥰


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